Glossary
SOP
Standard Operating Procedure
A written, versioned instruction that defines how one operation is performed, so any trained technician produces the same result.
An SOP turns individual know-how into a repeatable process. For a repair workshop that means a document per operation: intake inspection, a specific screen replacement, battery testing, grading, packing: each stating the tools, the steps, the acceptance criteria and what to do when the result is out of tolerance.
SOPs are what make a workshop scalable, not dependent on individuals. They shorten onboarding, make output consistent between shifts and sites, give quality problems a documented cause, and provide the evidence base that certification audits ask for.
They are also the artefact most often missing. Undocumented workshops run on the memory of a few experienced technicians, which works until those technicians are unavailable, until volume doubles, or until a second site has to produce identical results. The failure mode of a written SOP is different but real: a procedure that is not versioned, not reviewed and not connected to failure data quietly drifts away from what the workshop actually does.